An extremist, not a fanatic

November 01, 2013

Marxism, socialism & technology

Rejoice! Tim Worstall has become a Marxist. He points to an example of how technology shapes people's choices of whether to cooperate or not as corroboration of Marx's claim that "The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life." He then says:

If the old philandering sponger off Engels was correct on this then should we listen to the modern leftists who insist that we should all be doing much more cooperating socially and a lot less competing...? No, absolutely not: for what is being stated is that that level of cooperation or competition is emergent from the technologies in use... Even if the old boy was correct on this point the wailings of his successors are still wrong.

Here, though, Tim wrongly conflates the Marxist and non-Marxist lefts. Sure, the non-Marxist left wants more cooperation. But we Marxists see that, within the confines of capitalism, this is happy-clappy idealizing - a bit like Hopi Sen's "yes, we'd like a free pony." Marxists know that socialism requires particular material conditions, and that if these are lacking, revolution will be premature. As Marx said:

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed.

There are two particular conditions here:

1. People must be sufficiently wealthy that they have pro-social motives. Marx saw what Ben Friedman has corroborated - that the potential for cooperation grows with income; desperate men rarely think of others. Here's Jerry Cohen:

[Marx] thought that anything short of an abundance so complete that it removes all major conflicts of interests would guarantee continued social strife, "a struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business". It was because he was so uncompromisingly pessimistic about the social consequences of anything less than limitless abundance that Marx needed to be so optimistic about the possibility of that abundance. (Self-ownership, Freedom & Equality p10-11)

2. Technologies must exist which permit cooperative modes of production, and which capitalism cannot develop.

Here, though, it is quite possible to argue that we are moving in this direction, in (at least) two ways:

- The decline of mass production and rise of more human capital-intensive businesses means that traditional capitalism with external shareholders and top-down hierarchies is no longer technically efficient. A classic paper (pdf) by Luigi Zingales discusses this in non-Marxian terms.

- The internet is facilitating cooperation at the expense of traditional capitalism. We see this most clearly in the way the media and music industries are suffering, but we could add P2P lending too.

Sure, these are small beer now. But they might grow. The socialist revolution might take as long as the industrial revolution.

But that's not really my point. My point is rather that there is a sharp difference between Marxism and the soft left. One of these points of difference is that Marxists are sceptical about the possibilities for non-market forms of cooperation within capitalism. In this sense, Tim's more of a Marxist than he'd like to admit.

Comments

"The decline of mass production and rise of more human capital-intensive businesses means that traditional capitalism with external shareholders and top-down hierarchies is no longer technically efficient".

Though automation can create high-value roles (e.g. IT jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago), the aggregate impact is less human capital-intensive business, not more. That's why we have more robots, a growing surplus of labour, and stagnating wages for all but a few.

This means that top-down hierarchies, based on the ownership of capital (i.e. robots), are not going away.

"The internet is facilitating cooperation at the expense of traditional capitalism". No, it's facilitating global monopolies. For all the "long tail" ideological blether, the reality is consolidation. The Internet might look like devolution, but in reality it is a scale economy.

Of course both of these features, capital-labour substitution and monopolistic concentration, are as predicted by Marx.

All of these discussions are worthless because every discussion on socialism/Marxism utterly fails to consider human nature and, more importantly, the human survival instinct. While you all decry capitalism, you continue to promote and dream about a political philosophy that has repeatedly failed to fulfill its promise. In order to dismantle capitalism you must come up with something that uses human nature better than capitalism. Anything else is a waste of time.

Capitalism is a description of certain parts of the economic world. A state of affairs. It is not a cause of anything independent of the systems it describes.

And yet you are always describing it as one amongst a set of implied alternatives, as if "we" could switch it like an energy company.

I understand that Marx thought that capitalism was a self-limiting process that would produce certain conditions necessary and sufficient for its downfall. In which case is Marxism nothing more than an opinion about the future?

What about "the point is to change things"? What about economics not being properly concerned with grand forecasts?

There seems to be a tension between the Marxism view of an almost deterministic view of social mood (determined by conditions of production) and desire to change this mood somehow in order to initiate change.